Undercover UXO, a landmine avoidance game by Mich. State

By Joseph Leray

For the past week, I've been telling everyone that will listen about First They Killed my Father, a memoir by Cambodian activist Loung Ung about growing up under the Khmer Rouge before escaping to the United States. I talked about it on Podtoid this week; I talked about it in San Francisco during GDC. It's powerful stuff, reminiscent of John Hershey's Hiroshima in terms of the sobering reality of war.

Nevertheless, I'd really rather there be less great memoirs about terrible things, not more.

So it's with great pleasure that I introduce Undercover UXO, a game developed by Michigan State University's Corey Bohil, a visiting assistant professor of telecommunications, media, and information studies. Undercover UXO is a game designed to teach Cambodian children how to identify and avoid areas that could potentially house old landmines or other types of dangerous artillery.

"The real trick is how do you get people, especially kids, to look at these things long enough to sort of notice these kinds of (dangers)," Bohil explains to the State News. "It should be fun enough that a kid wants to play this game over and over again … and get enough repetition that when it transfers out into the real world, it translates into actual changes in behavior."

In the game, players control a child and her pet in search of food in the Cambodian landscape, avoiding unexploded ordinances (UXOs) by learning to associate brightly colored signs with danger.

The Golden West Humanitarian Foundation approached the team about the game, because they feel that current methods, like informational pamphlets, don't do enough to keep people safe. Bohil's team also nabbed a grant from the U.S. State Department's Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement for a cool $78,000.

And the best part -- besides, y'know, potentially saving lives -- is that the game is designed to run on low-cost computers provided by One Laptop Per Child, a non-profit designed to provide laptops to school children in third-world countries. The icing on the cake is that Undercover UXO is designed in such a way that Golden West will be able to swap the Cambodian landscape with other countries, allowing them to disseminate the game as far and wide as needed.

"Even if not everyone in the target audience has a chance to experience it, word of mouth can spread the educational message and awareness of the problem even better,” says Neil Owen, one of the game's programmers.